I. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to electronics circuits, and more specifically to techniques for generating local oscillator (LO) signals in a wireless communication device.
II. Background
A wireless communication device such as a cellular phone typically includes a transmitter and a receiver to support bidirectional communication. The transmitter may upconvert output baseband signals with transmit LO signals to obtain an output radio frequency (RF) signal that is more suitable for transmission via a wireless channel. The receiver may receive an input RF signal via the wireless channel and may downconvert the input RF signal with receive LO signals to obtain input baseband signals.
The receiver may include an inphase (I) mixer and a quadrature (Q) mixer to quadrature downconvert the input RF signal. An ideal mixer simply translates an input signal from one frequency to another frequency without distorting the input signal. A practical mixer, however, has non-linear characteristics that can result in generation of various intermodulation components. One such intermodulation component is second order intermodulation (IM2) distortion that is generated by second-order non-linearity of the mixer. IM2 distortion is problematic for a downconversion mixer because the magnitude of the IM2 distortion may be large and the IM2 distortion may fall on top of a desired signal, which may degrade the performance of the receiver.
For second-order non-linearity, the IM2 distortion level increases four folds when an input jammer level doubles. Jammers are large amplitude undesired signals. Second-order intercept point (IP2) is a theoretical point where the IM2 distortion level becomes equal to the desired signal level as the input jammer level is raised. A higher IP2 means lower IM2 distortion for a given input jammer level.
IP2 calibration may be performed for the I and Q mixers in the receiver in order to reduce the amount of IM2 distortion. For IP2 calibration, bias voltages for the I and Q mixers may be varied until either the maximum IP2 or a sufficiently high IP2 is obtained. IP2 calibration is a time consuming process that adds to overall production cost. A receiver with good performance that can avoid IP2 calibration or reduce the complexity of IP2 calibration is thus desirable.